Featured works by: Dion Zwirner American

The natural world serves as inspiration for Dion Zwirner's large-scale oil and mixed media works on paper. Highly abstracted, evocative studies of water, earth, sky and plant forms appear alternately ethereal and grounded. Zwirner works in a range of mediums: gouache, graphite, watercolor, acrylic and oil.

Her intimate pieces are rich in color and marked with paint's fluid quality, accentuating her playful engagement with wet mediums. Larger works in oil capture the artist's interest in gesture and evoke collections of remembered landscapes. The scale of these pieces carries a marked physicality; drips and pools of paint respond to gravity and reconnect the painting to the land.

Zwirner began her career in the San Francisco Bay Area, receiving her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Originally from Seattle she returned to the Pacific Northwest over 20 years ago. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including exhibitions in the United States, China, England and Italy. Notable awards and grants include the Ragdale Foundation Residency, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and the Mesa Art Center Purchase Award. Her work is included in private and public collections - the Museum of Northwest Art Permanent Collection, the Tacoma Art Museum Permanent Northwest Collection, the Bainbridge Museum of Art and numerous others nationally.